Trump and Putin sit down for talks on ending the war in Ukraine at a high-stakes summit in Alaska. Attorney General Pam Bondi is shifting decision-making authority away from Washington, D.C.’s local police chief. And an invasive tick species found in Connecticut carries the risk of a potentially life-threatening bacteria.
Here’s what to know today.
Putin enters talks with Trump from a position of strength
Russian President Vladimir Putin may already feel like a winner when he sits down Friday in Alaska with his American counterpart Donald Trump.
The two are set to meet at a military base in Anchorage to discuss efforts to end the war in Ukraine, in a high-stakes summit that marks the first time Putin will set foot on American soil in a decade and his first meeting with Trump since 2019. The events are scheduled to begin around 3 p.m. ET. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not expected to be included in the meeting.
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Putin, who has ruthlessly secured unprecedented power at home, has seen his army finally eke out a slight advantage on the battlefield in Ukraine. Now, invited in from the diplomatic cold, the Russian leader heads for Anchorage full of praise for Trump’s “energetic and sincere efforts” toward peace. This as Russian drone strikes killed seven civilians and injured 17 more across multiple Ukrainian regions last night and into today, according to local officials. Ukrainian strikes injured 12 in Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions, officials said.
In Moscow, there was a sense of confidence in Putin, though Pavek Grbenyuk, a 45-year-old who said he worked at a window manufacturing factory, told NBC News that he thought it was “unlikely anything will change dramatically.”
Trump — who is looking to cement his legacy as a “peacemaker” and win a Nobel Peace Prize — told European leaders that his goal is to secure a ceasefire and that he does not intend to discuss any possible divisions of territory. While Putin claims four Ukrainian territories — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — Zelenskyy and Ukrainian officials have long said they would not concede any territory that Russia illegally annexed.
In Ukraine’s eastern city of Kharkiv, soldier Artem Reshetilov, 46, urged Trump not to bend to Putin’s demands: “We don’t have to compromise with the enemy and give up our beloved land because this enemy won’t stop,” Reshetilov said at the funeral of his brother Andrei, 38, killed by a Russian artillery strike while fighting to defend Ukraine’s frontlines. “We know Russia and they never keep agreements,” he added.
Keir Giles, a senior fellow at London-based think tank Chatham House, said Putin has already scored a win. “Trump has facilitated Putin’s acceptance back into international diplomacy, despite the fact that he ought to be finding it difficult to travel, given his status as an internationally wanted war criminal,” he said.
Follow our live blog for the latest updates throughout the day.
DEA administrator named ‘emergency’ D.C. police chief
Attorney General Pam Bondi further cemented the Trump administration’s takeover of D.C. law enforcement on Thursday by shifting decision-making authority from its police chief and handing it to the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
In an interview on Fox News, Bondi previewed an order by the Justice Department naming DEA head Terry Cole as “emergency police commissioner” of the Metropolitan Police Department, days after Trump directed the federal government to take control of the local police and deployed the National Guard in an effort to mitigate crime in the nation’s capital.
The city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, has since pushed back against Bondi’s order, while D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb said it was “unlawful” and not based on any statute. Read the full story here.
The move comes hours after D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith issued an executive order allowing officers making traffic stops to notify ICE agents about undocumented immigrants they encounter, NBC Washington reported. The new policy will allow immigrants who have not been detained or charged with a crime to be reported to ICE for possible arrest and deportation. Trump called the order a “great step” and suggested the initiative could be something that “could happen all over the country.”
Meanwhile, a homeless encampment near the Kennedy Center, for which Trump serves as a chairman, was dismantled by city workers who shoved people’s belongings into garbage trucks. Data shows homelessness in the city has significantly dropped over the past decade.
Newsom escalates redistricting fight
California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state’s Legislature will formally launch next week an effort to redraw its congressional map, the latest move in what has become a nationwide tit-for-tat between Republican- and Democratic-led states over mid-decade redistricting in Texas and elsewhere.
At an event yesterday in Los Angeles, Newsom called on state lawmakers to approve a November ballot measure that would allow them to redraw maps and enact them in time for the 2026 midterm elections. The proposal would also allow state Democrats to circumvent the independent commission that usually controls the map-drawing process in the state.
In Texas, the current special legislative session is set to end on Friday, and state Democrats signaled they are inching closer to ending their protest. One condition of the Texas Democrats’ return home was that California Democrats propose their own new congressional maps. Read the full story here.
Read All About It
- Priscilla Presley’s former business partners accused her of hastening daughter Lisa Marie Presley’s death to secure her own spot atop Elvis’ financial kingdom, a bombshell lawsuit alleges.
- Social media posts spreading anti-vaccine myths surged in the months and weeks before a shooting last week at the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta.
- Chicago Federal Reserve President Austan Goolsbee is one of 12 people who will decide whether to cut interest rates next month. His tour of Mel-O-Cream Donuts in Springfield, Illinois, could factor into his decision.
- Glacial outburst floods aren’t anything new in Alaska, but flooding risks this week to Juneau show how the threat is shifting to new areas.
- A 20-year-old American pilot has been stuck in Antarctica for more than a month after he was accused of illegally landing there.
Staff Pick: An invasive tick is spreading a little-known, debilitating infection
One of the lesser known impacts of climate change is how it’s changing the behavior and spread of vectors like mosquitos and ticks. Human-to-vector contact is on the rise as some insects find their way to new places that are becoming warmer and wetter.
We wrote and produced this story after learning about a beach in Connecticut that closed for the season due to an influx of invasive long-horned ticks, a species only recently introduced to the state. One of the foremost tick experts in the country, entomologist Goudarz Molaei, also just discovered an emerging bacteria present in the longhorned tick that can cause a potentially deadly infection in humans. It’s an alarming combination: an invasive tick that can reproduce through cloning, ideal climate conditions for it to spread and the emergence of a concerning bacteria. — Nidhi Sharma, Climate Unit associate producer and Fiona Bork, Climate Unit intern
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